The Desert Rose (2 page)

I

H
ARMONY IS
driving home, eastward out of Las Vegas, her spirits high, her head a clutter of memories. Harmony loves to remember bits of her life, it makes her feel well, anyway, it’s all been interesting. One of the memories that pops in is something Ross used to say, which was that they ought to call Las Vegas Leg City, or else Titsburg. Ross was always thinking up funny names for things, he had kept her laughing right up until the time they had Pepper, plus about a year more, and then she and Pepper took him down to the bus station behind the Stardust one day, he was going to check on a job doing lights for a show up in Tahoe, and had sort of just never come back, although Pepper was as cute a little girl as anyone could want and Harmony herself at the time had been said by some to have the best legs in Las Vegas and maybe the best bust too, although that was long before she had ever done topless, so that only Ross and a few of her old boyfriends really knew the whole story there.

Ross did think she was great-looking though, there was no doubt of that, and their sex life had been okay—maybe not va-boom-karoom, which was the phrase Gary always used about people who had a big attraction for one another—but definitely okay, and they had almost had enough money to make a down payment on a house with a swimming pool. Didn’t happen, Pepper had to take swimming lessons down at the Stardust pool with the other kids whose parents worked in the show.

But then Harmony had always sort of known that legs and a sex life and a little girl and a house with a swimming pool hadn’t meant that much to Ross—he had told her right off he liked to change lives once in a while and he was such a good light man he could always get work.

It was just that Ross could always make her laugh, that had been the cute thing about him, she still smiled when she thought of Ross although he had started going bald and wasn’t even thirty when he left. She didn’t mind his going so much, Ross should get to change lives if that was what he liked, and he did send money, not too regularly but sometimes he would send a lot if he had a run at the craps tables, he had never been unkind, so if he liked to change lives that was okay. The only sad part was that Pepper was beautiful from the time she was about three, it seemed kind of wrong that Ross wasn’t getting to see it. By the time she was five Pepper could sing well enough that she could have probably even got on the radio if Harmony had ever had time to investigate that angle, somehow she never did. Once in a while she would dream that Pepper did sing on the radio and would maybe dedicate a song to her Daddy and Ross would hear it, that would be a nice thing for him. He was up in Reno, still working lights.

But then dreams, they weren’t too real—or maybe real but not too likely to happen. Pepper had got more interested in dancing than singing, although she still sang beautifully, Harmony thought—others too, particularly Myrtle, who owned the other half of the duplex they lived in.

Harmony had always wanted to sing—it was something she envied Pepper—but she had just never had much of a voice. The one time she auditioned people couldn’t keep from laughing, after all her name was Harmony but she couldn’t sing, who could blame them for laughing? “Harmony, accept your fate, just be beautiful,” Bonventre said—that was at the Dunes and he was a young producer then.
Still, once in a while she sat on the back steps and sang to her peacocks, they were about the only audience she could get to listen, them and Myrtle’s goats.

Meanwhile, driving out Sahara Avenue, as the night was into its finale, Olivia Newton-John sang to her, on the car radio, a song from
Grease
. Harmony had loved the movie, plus she truly did love driving home just as the day was beginning. Already dawn had sketched the outline of the mountains to the east in light gray. Usually after the show she and Jessie and Gary would go sit in the little keno bar at the Stardust and drink beer and wind down for a couple of hours. Mainly it was just listening to Gary talk, he was the wardrobe manager and if there was anybody who could talk more than Gary Harmony didn’t know who. Gary was an old friend, plus he had his own point of view, sort of an interested-in-everything point of view.

Jessie liked him a lot and once confided in Harmony that she still hoped Gary would stop being gay and fall in love with her, which was a hopeless wish of course, Gary couldn’t stop being gay just for Jessie’s sake, but he did spend most of his nights sitting around talking to two showgirls rather than hitting the discos or having dates, he was an unusual man, Gary, unusual for sure, if you were depressed or in any trouble there was no one better to talk to, not in Las Vegas anyway.

But usually it was Jessie who got depressed, and it was happening more and more lately. Even if the specific depression was over nothing worse than that one of the dancing nudes had told her her ass was getting dimpled, something normally bitchy like that, Jessie would just about sink out of sight she would be so unhappy. She would sit right in the keno bar and cry, with her stage makeup on, then she would just fade out and go to sleep with her head on the table, with Harmony and Gary both trying with might and main to cheer her up.

“It’s the end, I know it is,” Jessie always said, when she was sinking out of sight.

“No it
isn’t!
” Gary would insist, “it’s just that that little French girl told you your ass was dimpled.
She
certainly has no room to talk, her hips are wide enough that she could have had about five kids. Besides, she uses body makeup, which I
hate
because it turns the costumes orange and if it ever gets on the feathers you can just forget that costume, those feathers won’t come clean.”

By that time Jessie would usually already be asleep anyway, Gary’s case against the French girl was mostly overkill but body makeup was one of his pet peeves and he went through his little tirade anyway. Then he would get real concerned about Jessie and drive her home to make sure she didn’t have a wreck.

Once in a while Harmony let him drive her home too, not because she was usually tired or depressed or anything but mainly because it gave Gary a chance to see Pepper, he admired her so and thought she was so beautiful and talented.

Pepper loved it when Gary came, she thought he was the most knowledgeable man in the world and they would chatter away about clothes and hairstyles and makeup and dancing all through breakfast. Whereas Pepper would just about never have even a how-do-you-do for any of Harmony’s boyfriends, no matter how sweet they were or how nice they tried to be to her, except with Denny it was not just ignoring it was kind of more like hate, Denny wasn’t a guy you could just ignore, he was something but probably sweet wasn’t a good word choice for what Denny was.

Gary always brought Pepper beautiful clothes for her birthday, or sometimes just if he was coming out on Sunday or something he would bring Pepper clothes and she would model them for him. She had started modeling teen fashions at Goldwater’s when she was only ten—mainly she
just liked trying on the clothes, the actual modeling bored her. Even real young, Pepper thought of herself as a dancer, she didn’t really care for modeling apart from the makeup and getting her hair done and stuff.

The only thing not so very great about Pepper talking clothes so much with Gary was that it made her more critical where Harmony herself was concerned. Pepper did have the sense that she sort of absolutely knew what was good when it came to clothes—as she got older it got so Harmony could just about never find anything to wear that Pepper approved of. Harmony thought she dressed all right, after all she had always been thought to be one of the most glamorous showgirls in Las Vegas, she got to do all the publicity shots for the Stardust and met all the celebrities that came to town if management wanted them to meet a showgirl, and yet she could not seem to dress well enough to please Pepper.

“Couldn’t you just buy a plain white blouse sometime?” Pepper had said only the week before—Harmony had been cleaning out her closets. “Every single blouse you’ve got is tacky.”

Harmony didn’t pay the remark any attention at the time, but later it came back to her when she was in a low mood anyway because of some things Denny said when he was drunk, and those things plus Pepper thinking her blouses were tacky were too much and she went out and sat under the little lawn umbrella and cried so hard she couldn’t see the peacocks. Although it was silly, Pepper was just sixteen, she didn’t really know everything there was to know about clothes even if Gary did brag on her taste all the time. It was just that the word had been wrong—tacky, it was the word that was hurtful, it was the one thing Harmony had always tried to avoid being and if your own little girl said it about you then it had to arouse some doubts. Though mainly it was just that Pepper always
stuck to basic colors, she was very insistent about it, whereas Harmony liked clothes that were a little more unusual, she liked gold blouses or maybe blouses with a little purple in them, something you’d notice.

After all, wearing those costmes every night, being a feathered beauty as Bonventre used to call her, sort of changed your attitude toward clothes. After the costumes it was sort of hard to know you were there if you didn’t wear clothes with a little color in them. Pepper just didn’t realize that, she was so beautiful she didn’t even need makeup yet.

Harmony turned off the pavement onto a little dirt road that was the last road there was to turn off on, if you were going east out of Las Vegas. She rolled the window down—it was good to smell the desert in the morning, even in the winter she liked to get some air when she was driving home. After all the smoke in the casino just the clean air and the dry sagey smell made her feel lively. Now the outline over the mountains was gold instead of gray and the stars were beginning to die out in a cloudless sky.

Seeing the line of sun over the mountains made her hopeful, it just about always did, for another beautiful day was about to get started, which meant to Harmony that things could really be fresh and there could be a lot to hope for if you took the trouble to notice, instead of getting depressed, as Jessie did.

Harmony kept wishing Jessie had taken her advice and got a little house out closer to the desert, she had an apartment a block off the Strip, which was handy it was true but still didn’t offer the great sights Harmony had to look forward to every day, such as the desert and her peacocks and the streamers of sun creeping over the mountains—though of course Jessie was scared of peacocks along with about everything else, but still, just to get farther from the Strip and see a real morning once in a while might have at least
taken her mind off bad comments she heard in the dressing room. Genevieve, the French girl, wasn’t that bad really, it was just her little boy had a learning disability and she got upset sometimes and said bitchy things, plus at the moment all Jessie had that might take her mind off her various problems was Monroe, not exactly the world’s greatest prize in the boyfriend department, at least not in Harmony’s opinion.

When she turned off the pavement onto the bumpy dirt road Harmony looked back at the Strip, eight miles away. It looked so miniature, like a wonderful toy place, with all the lights still on, whereas on her other side there was a bright band of sun behind the mountain, from horizon to horizon. It was one of her favorite things, to turn onto her own road with the air smelling so good and be able to see the Strip, with the Trop up at one end and the Sahara at the other, and besides that have the sun coming up just as she got home. With sights like that to see every day, who could complain?

Pretty as the sunrise was, though, it wasn’t enough to keep her mind off the fact that Myrtle’s car was acting like it meant to konk out. Harmony had been having to borrow it ever since Denny totaled their Pontiac, three weeks before. Myrtle was generous in emergencies, which was a good thing because it was definitely an emergency, since Denny had taken off the day after he totaled the Pontiac. The insurance check hadn’t come yet either, though Harmony had been told several times it would come any day. Myrtle’s car was an old Buick station wagon which was sort of manageable on the highway but got cases of the jerks when you had to go slow. There was no way to keep from going slow on the dirt road, to go fast meant probably knocking the bottom out, which Myrtle no doubt would not appreciate, she didn’t consider Harmony a good driver anyway.

The more she slowed down for the bumps the worse the Buick jerked. Also, it could not be said that it smelled so great, mainly because Myrtle was in the habit of stuffing Maude, her main goat, into the car, so she’d have company while she roamed around Las Vegas or went to Boulder City to check out garage sales. Myrtle had very little to do except go to garage sales or else hold them in their mutual garage. The car had so many goat hairs in it that Harmony had to spread towels on the front seat in order to keep from being covered with them when she got to work.

Well, this car’s not going to make it home, I guess we’re down to no cars, she concluded, about five seconds before the Buick konked out.

She tried the ignition but all that did was make about fifteen little red lights flash on the dashboard, plus some white smoke was pouring out from under the hood so Harmony grabbed the newspaper she had bought Myrtle and took off down the road, it was just maybe a quarter of a mile on home and she enjoyed a nice walk anyway.

Before she had been walking two minutes she heard her peacocks calling, she only had three now, Joaquin her favorite, the most beautiful of them all, had somehow gotten out of the yard and fallen prey to coyotes, but the three that were left were beautiful too. She knew some people didn’t like to hear peacocks but she loved to hear them in the still morning, across the quiet desert, it could almost make her cry if she was feeling lonely.

Particularly since Denny had left she was spending more and more time with the peacocks, though Pepper thought it was creepy and Mrytle argued that peacocks weren’t survivors, like goats. Myrtle was hipped on survival and anyway Maude was every bit as spoiled as a peacock, if not more so. Harmony loved to sit and have the peacocks come and eat kernels of corn out of her hand, they were quite delicate and hardly ever pecked her. Then they would get
through and go spread their beautiful feathers and parade them around the yard, which would have been just an ugly little yard in the desert if the peacocks hadn’t been there.